Thursday, June 19, 2014

One Small Wish Granted

Despite demonized online genealogical sites these past few
days, barring me from seeking the answer to one small research quandary—what,
exactly, was the name of Kelly family descendant Ella Creahan’s second husband—I can’t say the time was
passed without any light notes. Social media was abuzz with complaints over
loss of access at Ancestry.com and related sites Find A Grave and Rootsweb.com,
but some took the inconvenience with a measure of grace. Diana Haddad of Family Tree Magazine's blog Genealogy Insider summarized the best of
the wry, smile-inducing observations regarding the denial of service attacks
suffered by these companies in her post yesterday.

Hopefully, the tumult has subsided and those of us not
spirited away by World Cup fanaticism can resume a measure of normalcy—which,
in many cases, means getting back to some serious genealogy research.

As I mentioned yesterday, uncovering two dissimilar surnames
for Ella Creahan’s second marriage—added, of course, to her first married name
rendered alternately as Fulk and Faulk—got me curious. Which was the right rendition? I thought a
visit to Find A Grave might resolve the Fulk versus Faulk question, if not
provide clues to the second marriage’s struggle between records claiming the
name was Timmons versus Tumison.

I had already attempted finding mentions for either surname
via the Indiana GenWeb index for the local newspaper in Lafayette, Indiana,
where Ella had, for most of her life, lived. Strangely, though the index ranges
from 1902 through 1952, I couldn’t find reasonable possibilities for any of
these surnames.

Find A Grave, which had stubbornly resisted my attempts to
gain entrance for two whole days, finally produced a few hints. The first was
the entry for Ella’s first husband, Homer Fulk—yes! It was Fulk—which corroborated his date of death as April 10, 1892. Taking a closer look at that entry, I thought the grave location looked
familiar, so I checked back at Ella’s own Find A Grave entry. Remember, I had
presumed she was buried in her parents’ family plot, since the grave location
seemed to match. As it turned out, both she and Homer were buried at the same
location in Saint Mary’s Cemetery in Lafayette.

So what about that second husband—Scott, whose surname was
transcribed as Tumison for an index to the Tippecanoe County marriage records,
but listed in the 1900 census as Timmuns? What was available on Find A Grave
for him? After all, beyond that 1900 census, I couldn’t find any further sign
of him in either version of his name.

There was a Scott Timmons listed in Find A Grave, but I can’t
entirely be sure it is the same person as Ella’s Scott. For one thing, there is
no entry for the date of birth of the one candidate that came up in the search
results. A second item is that his record notes that he died, not in the city where he was buried, but across the state in Fort Wayne. Finally, his was not a burial in
the local Catholic cemetery. This Scott Timmons died June 11, 1926, at the age
of sixty one—making this a possibility—and was laid to rest in Spring Vale
Cemetery.

There is, of course, one remedy to this puzzle. Remember,
Ella’s own obituary was published back in the Monroe
County newspaper in her first husband’s
hometown, Bloomington.
That’s the home of that nifty library which provides copies of obituaries for a
modest service charge. Noting how quickly they turned around my last request, I
suspect we will have the answer to these questions in a matter of only a few
more days—as long as the library’s servers have not been attacked by the same
high tech plague assaulting those others of our favorite online genealogy
resources.

About Me

It is my contention that, after a lifetime, one of the greatest needs people have is to be remembered. They want to know: have I made a difference?
I write because I can't keep for myself the gifts others have entrusted to me. Through what I've already been given--though not forgetting those to whom I must pass this along--from family I receive my heritage; through family I leave a legacy. With family I weave a tapestry. These are my strands.